Husband and Wives (14 page)

‘Well, now, no, I never thought about that,’ Brother Earl said.

‘Then you’re as dumb a fuck as he is!’ Bill said, and sank back down in his chair.

Jean Mcdonnell – Thursday

Holly Humphries called me to let me know that Rachael and the children were coming into the hospital. The daycare was getting ready to close, so I asked my secretary to pick up John and bring him to my office, then I notified the ER and headed down there myself. Rachael was immediately rushed to intensive care and the children treated with emergency care then sent to the pediatric wing. I went with them upstairs. There were two boys and three girls. The boys shared a room and a third bed was brought into another room so all three girls could be together. The girl with the shorn hair and black dress was named Melissa. It took about an hour of hydration before she began to talk, and this young lady seemed to have no desire to ever stop talking.

‘They’re horrible people!’ she told me in a hoarse voice. ‘He beats on my mommy and she doesn’t feed us all day sometimes! She calls my mommy names and sometimes she hits her too! And she locked me in the cellar for two days one time and then she started shaving my head, but my mommy made her stop, and then she started hitting my mommy! And then Papa comes in – he made us call him papa, but he isn’t our papa! Our real daddy died when he fell off the tractor and it ran over him! There was blood everywhere; I heard my mommy tell our preacher! And not that Brother Earl either, our real preacher back in Tyler! Brother Timothy! Brother Earl’s always saying that girls are unclean and should be kept away some of the time. I don’t know when, but I don’t wanna ever be kept away, but I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to be kept away from! He just don’t make any sense, that Brother Earl! Brother Timothy was always nice and talked about heaven and Jesus and stuff, not about the Devil and damnation and how bad women are! My mommy’s a woman and she’s not bad at all!’

She stopped and I took a long breath. ‘Wow,’ I said.

‘And that’s not all . . .’ she said, starting up again.

I touched her arm. ‘Melissa, I think you need to rest, you’ve been through a horrible ordeal—’

‘I don’t know what an ordeal is, but I can tell you this, Papa’s a bad man! He hits all the time, and not just me and Mommy, he hits the boys a bunch! Mommy would get mad and try to stop him, and then he’d just start hitting her! I don’t like Papa one little bit, and you can tell him I said so!’

I could see why Michael and Emily had abused this child more than the others: Melissa had spunk. She stood up to them and probably talked back to them – certainly talked back to them. I patted her hand and told her I’d be back in a minute, and went into the next room to talk to the boys.

The oldest at fourteen, Matthew, was subdued, but the anger he was feeling radiated off his body like a high fever. ‘May I talk to you?’ I asked him.

He nodded his head but didn’t say anything.

‘I’m trying to find out what went on in that house. The more information we have, the longer we can put Michael and Emily away for. What can you tell me?’

Matthew shrugged his shoulders but didn’t open his mouth. I turned to his brother, Luke, who was twelve. ‘How about you?’

He looked to his older brother for guidance and then just shrugged his shoulders.

‘I don’t know why you two won’t talk to me,’ I said, ‘but I want you to know that Melissa already has.’

Luke snorted, and I looked at him. ‘What?’ I asked.

He again looked at his brother, then back at me. ‘Melissa don’t suffer fools gladly,’ he said.

‘And that means . . .?’ I started.

‘It means,’ Matthew said, rising up on his elbows, ‘that she’s braver than me and she took them assholes on when I was too chicken shit to do it, and she got beat for her efforts. And her pretty hair was all cut off!’ There were tears in his eyes when he threw his body back on the bed.

‘That’s not your fault, Matthew,’ I said. ‘If you had interfered they would have just beaten you and still hurt Melissa.’

‘I’m the man of my family,’ he said. ‘At least I’m supposed to be. Instead, looks like Melissa turned out to be.’

The gender roles in this family were so tightly specific that it was hard to find a toehold to give the boy some comfort. Luke just looked at the floor, refusing to look at either his brother or me. I’m sure he felt the same as Matthew, that Matthew had messed up and that he, Luke, should have taken his place but didn’t. And they both felt shame that a
girl
had to take up for the family.

I forget sometimes how far we’ve come, even in a small town like Longbranch. Gender roles are probably a bit more specific here than in a large city, but still there are women deputies at the sheriff’s department and male nurses at the hospital, and I saw a young woman up on a telephone pole just last week. We accept these things. Sure, there are a lot of stay-at-home moms, but these days it’s mostly their choice, and there are some men who chose to stay at home with their children as well. These things are commonplace now, so much so that it’s a shock when you find families, such as some of these plural ones, locked in nineteenth-century gender roles.

But the McKinsey family was dabbling in more than gender preference: what they’d been doing to the family from Tyler, Texas, amounted to slavery. It was going to take these children, and their mother, a long time to recover from what Michael and Emily McKinsey had put them through.

Milt Kovak – Thursday

Around eight o’clock that night, about an hour after Bill Williams had taken Brother Earl Mayhew back to Tejas County, I got a text from Holly Humphries, who was working some overtime.

‘Mr McKinsey’s lawyer’s here, Sheriff,’ she said.

Oh, goodie, I thought, wondering who would be stupid enough to admit they were that asshole’s lawyer. ‘Send him in,’ I told Holly.

I was looking down at some paperwork when a shadow was cast across my office floor. I looked up to see David Bollinger, the only father of a normal-looking plural family, standing there.

‘Hey, Sheriff,’ he said, smiling big at me. ‘I’m Mike McKinsey’s attorney. Can we talk?’

I halfway stood up and waved my hand at one of my visitor’s chairs. ‘Have a seat,’ I said.

He did and then breathed a big sigh. ‘Now this is a real kettle of fish, don’t you think?’

‘If you’re referring to the charges against Mr McKinsey,’ I said, ‘I think it’s a bit more than a kettle of fish. Or even a barrel of monkeys. It’s more like a cage full of abused and neglected children.’

Bollinger shook his head. ‘Brother Earl Mayhew, our pastor?’

I nodded my head.

‘He called me. Told me what had happened. I had a message on my phone from Mike saying he was in trouble and at the sheriff’s office, but he didn’t say what for.’

‘Have you been in to see him yet?’ I asked.

‘No, sir,’ he said, shaking his head for emphasis. ‘I wanted to hear it from you first.’

Since he was the defense attorney, I just gave him the basics. I’d already talked to our DA and he was working up as many charges as he could come up with, so I didn’t want Bollinger to know all the aces up our sleeves.

Bollinger shook his head all through what I had to say. When I stopped, still shaking his head, he said, ‘There’s got to be some mistake. I’ve known Mike since we moved here. Good man. Real good man. Not a bit of violence in him. I’d stake my reputation on that.’

‘You do that a lot?’ I asked. ‘Stake your reputation on the vagrancies of assholes?’

Bollinger stood up. ‘I’d like to see my client now,’ he said.

I pushed the button on our new telephone system that got me to Holly. ‘Yes, sir?’ she said.

‘Mr Bollinger, the attorney, is coming out now. Please let him see the prisoner,’ I said. I thought the words ‘the prisoner’ rather than ‘his client’ sounded lots better.

‘Yes, sir,’ Holly said.

I pointed at the door and Bollinger nodded his head. ‘Thank you, Sheriff.’

I just nodded back.

Twenty minutes later, Bollinger came out of our little cellblock and strolled down to my office. He was grinning as he leaned against my doorjamb. ‘You’re not getting sued,’ he said.

‘That’s good,’ I said, leaning back in my chair.

‘County’s not getting sued.’

‘That’s good too.’

‘Oklahoma’s not getting sued.’

‘That works.’

‘Other than that, what can I say?’ he said.

‘Well, you could say the asshole pleads guilty to all charges, including the murder of Mary Hudson,’ I said.

Bollinger was shaking his head before I got all my words out.

‘Not going to happen,’ he said. ‘I’m a tax attorney, not a criminal attorney, so I’ll have to find him one.’

‘Who’s gonna pay for all this?’ I asked.

‘All what, Sheriff?’

‘Your services, the criminal attorney’s services, all that?’ I asked.

He smiled but shook his head. ‘That’s not for me to say.’ He straightened up from my doorjamb. ‘I’ll call you in a couple of days, let you know the new attorney’s name, or he or she will call you. Got any referrals?’

I just smiled and watched as he left the office. Then the question became, did Michael McKinsey kill Mary Hudson, or was it someone else? Did I formally charge McKinsey with it or not? I needed to have a talk with our little assistant district attorney.

I usually only have a deputy on duty till midnight, then we got somebody on call, which means the phone calls, if we get any, are directed to that person’s cell phone. Back in the old days, we had to either have somebody on duty all night or, for a while, we just went with a sign on the door saying call this number in an emergency. Now we’ve got all these new gadgets that do everything but blow your nose, and then half the time they don’t work. OK, half the time they don’t work
for me
. I’m snake-bit when it comes to electronic bullshit. I put a finger on a computer or one of them fancy cell phones or a blackberry or any of that other crap, and it’s just gonna up and die. Hand to God.

Anyway, with two people in lock-up we had to have round-the-clock babysitting so, since Dalton had come on at three in the afternoon, he’d stay till midnight. Jasmine had come in early that morning so I let her go early and told her to go home and get some rest, ’cause she’d be taking the midnight to six a.m. Nita was new; I figured she owed it to me to come in at six in the morning. Prove she could power through – or whatever.

I wasn’t sure how long we’d have to do this, and I was thinking if it took a while we could transfer the prisoners to the Longbranch city jail, because they’ve got a permanent round-the-clock staff. But the chances of Michael and Emily McKinsey getting bail were pretty big; I didn’t have any real evidence to charge ’em with murder – only attempted murder and child endangerment, which I thought was enough to have them put
under
the jail, but some judges tend to disagree. Meanwhile, since we don’t have separate areas for male and female prisoners, this being the first time we ever had one of each at the same time, Mr and Mrs McKinsey were in neighboring cells, which I think was breaking some State law, but I wasn’t sure. Have to check that.

I headed home around nine. Jean had taken her own car in to work that day, so she and Johnny Mac were already home. She’d told me earlier she’d be leaving once she’d got the McKinsey kids settled at the hospital for the night.

Being as late as it was, Johnny Mac was already in bed, bath time and teeth brushing time already taken care of. Jean has a hard time on the stairs up to his room, so she’d read him stories in the living room and send him up to bed on his own. He called out my name when I walked in the door, so God only knows what he’d been doing up there, ’cause sleeping was obviously out of the question.

Since eight o’clock was his bedtime, I made it upstairs and into his room, saying, ‘What are you doing up, Bucko? You should have been asleep an hour ago!’

‘Daddy?’ Johnny Mac said.

I sat down next to him on the bed. ‘Yeah, son?’

‘Can I call you Dad instead of Daddy?’

I felt my stomach heave and I didn’t know why. Maybe because I still called my father Daddy even though he’d been dead for over twenty years. So I said, ‘Well, honey, you know, Dad is what really big kids, like teenagers, call their daddies. And I really like it when you call me Daddy. Can we keep that for a while longer?’

Johnny Mac stared at me hard, then sighed. ‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘Mommy said the same thing. Weird, huh?’

I kissed him on the forehead. ‘Double weird,’ I told him.

‘Daddy?’

‘Yeah, son?’

‘My friend told me that a lady, a mommy, got killed – murdered, like on TV. Did you hear about that?’

‘It happens sometimes honey, but it’s nothing for you to worry about,’ I said, wondering if there was already talk about Mary Hudson’s murder at the grammar school.

He sat up, getting excited. ‘And my friend told me she had a hundred million kids and one of them killed her. With a laser gun!’

‘Whoa!’ I said. ‘Now I didn’t hear anything about something like that!’ I told him.

‘Yeah, and there was blood everywhere! And then the kid, the one who killed her, turned the laser gun on all the other hundred bunch of kids, but then they got together and jumped him and––’

‘Now this is getting into the realm of storytelling, Johnny Mac.’

‘It’s not a story, Daddy, it’s true!’ he insisted.

‘So how much of this true story did your friend tell you, and how much of it did you tell him?’

Johnny Mac thought about it for a moment. ‘Well, he told me about the lady and that she got killed and all, but we sorta made up the rest of it. It’s just a joke,’ he said, lying back down.

‘Not a funny joke, is it?’ I said.

‘No, I guess not.’

I gave him another kiss on the forehead. ‘You get some sleep, son.’ And I headed downstairs to the living room. Jean was on the couch, her laptop on her lap.

‘What’ya doing?’ I asked when I came in.

‘Checking out the foster care system.’

‘You gonna stick those kids in foster care?’ I demanded. I’ll admit to being a little het-up at this.

‘No, I’m trying to keep them out,’ she said, giving me a look. I sat down next to her. ‘But the problem is what if Rachael doesn’t
get
better? Can we send them back to Texas, to their church family there or, since Rachael was married to McKinsey—’